Timothy Carter

Helping leads feel comfortable with your brand and gaining their trust is a big part of successfully converting potential new customers. Although there is a plethora of ways to do this, strategically placing testimonials from previous customers is one highly effective way to do this. Many times, this is all a potential customer needs to get over the buying hump and actually make a purchase. But there are many more reasons why testimonials are important now and growing in importance in the online marketing strategy realm. Let’s discuss the other advantages of testimonials and how to utilize them in your marketing companies. Increases Credibility and Authority In a world where most industries have countless businesses competing for a piece of the pie, almost anyone can say that they’re an expert in their field. When prospective customers have little information to go on, they don’t really know who is authentic and who is merely a charlatan. That’s where digital marketing testimonials come in. By placing a quote from an actual customer who has direct experience with a business, it verifies the claim and lends an aire of credibility. It’s a simple and straightforward way to validate a business and can diminish skepticism substantially. When compared to a competitor without client testimonials, this can give your new business a sizable advantage. Explains Specific Benefits When potential customer is contemplating whether or not to buy a product or service, they’re wondering how it will solve a problem or benefit them. Many times, they will be swayed to make a purchase by simply seeing the package or photos of the product or service in action. Other times, they need a bit more convincing in order to take action. Digital marketing Testimonials are helpful because they provide an opportunity to state specific benefits from others who have experience with the product or service. If a business sells a product that relieves arthritis, it might include a testimonial from a customer stating “this product eliminated my arthritis within one week.” This would tell prospective customers about how the product improved their life in a highly specific manner. If they had any questions beforehand pertaining to the details, a testimonial would address them while providing direct proof that the product’s claims are legitimate. Offers Unbiased Evidence It’s only natural that a company will want to portray itself and its products/services in a positive light. As a result, consumers may be wary of a bias, which can lead to apprehension or distrust. One of the best ways to alleviate consumer doubts is to provide tangible evidence from an outside party who is unaffiliated with the marketing agency. Incorporating a statement from someone who has nothing to gain, but simply wants to provide their input stemming from a positive experience, it can be a powerful motivator that gets others to buy. Increases Conversion Rates When you combine all of these previous advantages, it results in the biggest advantage of all… more conversions. According to Visual Website Optimizer, a case study by WikiJob proved that A/B testing customer testimonials increased their sales by 34 percent. While it’s unlikely that all businesses will experience this high of a sales increase, it shows that testimonials have an undeniable impact on consumers. Now that we know that advantages of this tactic, here are three ways to obtain testimonials: Create a submission form -This is perhaps the easiest way and can be done by placing a form somewhere on your business’s website. Typically, this will be located underneath the header or on the sidebar so anyone with a positive experience can conveniently offer their feedback. Send an autoresponder – Every time someone makes a purchase, you can follow up via an autoresponder that asks for their input. This will automatically send consumers an email that gives them the opportunity to explain their experience. Picking a few of the top comments can provide you with some valuable testimonials. Contact repeat customers – If you notice that a particular customer has bought from your business multiple times, you can send them an email to thank them for their purchases and also ask for a brief testimonial. Obviously, they must have a relatively positive experience if they are a repeat customer, so they can be the perfect person to approach. Here are some tips for implementing testimonials into your digital advertising: Be Compliant with the Law First, you want to ensure that you’re acting within the law and not doing anything that could be considered unethical. Checking out this post from the Hubspot will provide guidance and keep your testimonials on the up and up. Some things they mention include getting written permission, the following the truth in advertising guidelines, and not misleading consumers. Never, for any reason, create your own testimonials or alter their content. If it doesn’t summarize all of the information you want to convey, it’s best to use another testimonial instead. Get Plenty of Information Whenever someone agrees to provide a testimonial, you should extract additional information to go along with it. It’s helpful to get a professional-looking picture of the person who gave the testimonial, as this helps establish its legitimacy. While a basic text quote is still helpful, including an image is ideal. Also, listing a person’s geographic location and/or company name and position is smart. According to Entrepreneur, A good testimonial is from someone your audience can relate to. You want your visitors to see that your product helped someone just like them. Make sure your testimonials come from someone with whom your target market can identify. Specificity As mentioned before, it’s important to be specific. Whenever using a testimonial, never be vague or leave any of the consumer’s questions unanswered. If you receive a comment that’s somewhat ambiguous, go ahead and ask the person to clarify so consumers will understand exactly how they will benefit from buying your product or service.   Placement Once you have obtained a few quality testimonials, it’s important to put them in the right

SEO (search engine optimization) is a big world, stretching across multiple online marketing strategies to become unified in a single, focused campaign. From on-page SEO and ongoing content to social media activity and off-site link-building services, (off-page SEO) the most successful companies are the ones that pay attention to every facet of SEO. There are a thousand “wrong” ways to do SEO, including spamming backlinks or writing fluff content stuffed with relevant keywords, but what many people don’t know is that there are actually several “right” ways to do it. Even as you do your best to follow best practices in every SEO-related vertical, there are three possible SEO approaches you can take for your campaign. Keep in mind, this blog post is not: An exhaustive beginner’s guide to SEO strategies  A guide that includes all strategies for gaining backlinks It’s a very basic overview that represents more of your own personal or business mission statement for how you want your company to approach SEO for your own website(s) or web pages. Let’s dive in! The Aggressive SEO Approach The aggressive SEO approach is generally used by companies looking to rank high in search engines and as quickly as possible. Sometimes, this is a startup doing SEO looking to make a big impact with a low budget, and other times this is a well-established company looking to break into the world of digital marketing for the first time. No matter the case, this company is either new to the scene or otherwise desperately motivated to get more online attention. The aggressive approach is all about rapid expansion. It involves the creation of multiple onsite posts—usually at least one per day—high-volume social media activity, and a sharply scaling offsite link-building process. The key benefit of this is the rapid build of rank and domain authority; taking all these actions quickly and uniformly over the course of as little as two months can have a substantial impact on your long-term rank. However, you must keep in mind that domain history plays a part in its authority—if you’ve just purchased your domain, don’t expect to build a great authority in your first year. There are two major downsides to the aggressive SEO approach. First, it costs money. Unless you plan on doing everything yourself, you’ll need to pay for all those high-quality blog posts and all the time that must be spent vetting external link sources. Second, it’s risky. Even if you prioritize the quality of your production, the fact that you’re working quickly leaves you vulnerable to errors and quality slips. If you choose the aggressive approach, take extra caution. The Competitive SEO Approach The competitive approach may sound similar to the aggressive approach, but it’s possible to perform work based on your competition without becoming aggressive. Usually, this company isn’t sure about their SEO efforts. They may not have specific goals, they may be wary of SEO’s effectiveness, or they may have no idea what they’re doing. In any case, they’re mostly interested in SEO only to gain an edge over their competition or stay afloat in the competitive digital landscape. Because of this, the competitive approach is all about using your competitors and gaining ground on them wherever possible. It involves looking at your competitors’ blogs and finding inspiration for topics of your own. It involves researching your competitors’ backlink profiles and mirroring those profiles the best you can. It also involves performing highly detailed long tail keywords and finding the target keyword valuable to your company that your competitors haven’t yet touched. It’s a way of analyzing your competition, mirroring their strengths and taking advantage of their weaknesses. In many respects, this approach is the most efficient. It doesn’t require the budget that an aggressive approach would, and it has a surgical focus intended to get you one rank higher in organic search results than your biggest competitors. However, this focus on beating the competition also has some drawbacks. First, positioning yourself in line with a competitor could damage public perception of your brand by making you indistinguishable. Second, you’ll be spending less time developing your infrastructure, which makes you poised more for short-term gains than long-term sustainability, thus reducing the total eventual value of your SEO campaign. The User-Focused SEO Approach Finally, the user-focused approach can be implemented without any prior knowledge of SEO strategy. You’ll still have to make some onsite tweaks, such as ensuring your meta titles and descriptions (meta tags) are in order, but for the most part, this approach can be implemented by anybody. It’s usually reserved for companies interested in gaining higher ranks in search engines, but aren’t concerned with meeting specific traffic numbers in the short-term, and aren’t too worried about the competition. Instead, they want a steady, long-term path for growth with minimal risk and a minimal budget. The user-focused approach is simple. Make moves and produce content that is going to make your users happy. Design your website so a visitor enjoys the experience. Write an SEO content strategy that is truly valuable for your users. Post on social media in a way that’s funny or entertaining. Dedicate yourself to making your users as happy as possible. Happy users will share your content, post links to you, and generally behave in a way that will naturally increase your domain authority—and you’ll never have to worry about getting penalized for sneaky or unnatural practices. This strategy’s biggest drawback is the fact that it takes time and commitment to execute properly. You won’t see the immediate pragmatic results of the competitive approach or the quick scalability of the aggressive approach, but you’ll also pave a risk-free road to steady long-term growth in the process. Which Approach to SEO is Best? The best approach is the one that does the best job of meeting your goals. If you have some extra money to spend and you’re looking to rise quickly, go aggressive. If you’re only interested in SEO to get a quick

Link building is still one of the most effective offsite search engine optimization practices around—the more high-quality links you have, the better. But with the onset of advanced Google updates like Penguin 3.0, it’s becoming more and more difficult to build “natural” backlinks on your own. In most cases, it’s better and easier to let your readers and customers do the work for you, by creating content that naturally encourages people to build links pointing back to your site. That may seem difficult, but when put into practice, you may find it’s one of the easiest—and most effective—link building strategies around. Try using these 10 tactics to attract more links to your onsite content. And, if you simply don’t have the time, consider hiring our professional link building services. Show Something New People like to see what’s new, and if it’s new enough and different enough, they’ll want to share it to their friends and followers. Nothing satisfies social urges quite like being the first person to share something new and exciting. If you have a new product or service to unveil, write a post about it, and talk about how it’s going to change the industry. You can also share a new take on an old problem or share a new idea that has future potential. Anything you can do to share something new will pay off in spades. Tease Your Audience Build anticipation whenever possible. Anticipation leads to more attention, and the value of whatever you build to will correspondingly increase. You can build this anticipation by teasing your audience of a release to come—either in the form of social media posts, or by the creation of a webinar or content series. For example, you can make posts leading to a specific date like “We’ve got a big announcement for you next week!” and “only two days until the big reveal!” Your content, when revealed, will pack a much bigger punch, and your users will be far more likely to link to it as a result. Take a Firm Stance or Have a Strong Opinion Controversy can be a good thing. If you have the opportunity to take a firm stance on a major issue in your industry, or something else debatable, you should take it. Make sure your stance is in line with your brand standards, but don’t be afraid to firmly pick a side. Don’t be afraid to take a strong opinion but be prepared for blowback. You do run the risk of alienating some of your readers, but the remainder will be far more loyal and passionate about your brand. Those loyal followers will be highly likely to link to your strong, opinionated content—especially if they’re posting their own variations of it! Give Your Readers a Surprise Giving users exactly what they expect can lead to satisfaction, but if you give your users a surprise, they’ll remember it. Create content that offers something surprising—you can support an unconventional opinion, offer a unique solution, or simply have a sudden twist in your video content to evoke a surprised response. That surprise element is invaluable to facilitating interest from your readership. People like to share surprises to others, so your content will be far more likely to attract links from other bloggers and readers. Perform & Publish Original Research Original research is one of the juiciest and most attractive forms of content you can provide. Original research is—as the name suggests—original, and that means users can’t get your data anywhere else. Your data is also going to be valuable, at least to somebody, and many people will want to link to you simply to credit you as a source of their information. You’ll be the root source of dozens, if not hundreds, of secondary articles, most of which will link to you as the original source. The only problem with this strategy is the amount of time and effort it takes to perform original research properly. Let Others Guest Blog on Your Site (w/Discretion) This strategy is much easier, and can be done by any company in any industry. Make a public request for guest bloggers—most writers are itching to write guest blogs as a source of new readership and more brand visibility. While allowing guest bloggers within your industry to post on your blog might actually send some of your users their way, the benefits to your brand can be just as powerful. Your readerships will “cross over,” and your guest bloggers’ current fans will be likely to link to their content—plus, your guest bloggers will be more than happy to share the links to their content on your site. Conduct Interviews and Surveys Interviews and surveys are almost a type of original research that doesn’t take much time to implement or analyze. Surveys (like this one from Databox) can be extremely simple, but effective at gaining citations and earning links. Essentially, you’ll be borrowing the authority of an individual or group of people in order to substantiate your own content—either with new insights or aggregated data. This strategy will attract links, either because it’s interesting, because it’s informative, or some mixture of the two. And if you’re conducting an interview with an individual, make sure to ask him/her to share it with his/her current fans. Create Something Funny or Entertaining Funny content is self-explanatory—if your content makes somebody laugh, they’ll be far more likely to share and link to it. The trick is to find something funny to create. Amusing videos are one of the more popular options, but you can also write a parody post or something similar. If your brand voice is casual or flexible, you have a lot of room to work with—remember, that everybody loves to laugh deep down. Write Landmark Pieces Landmark pieces, like whitepapers or thorough “ultimate” guides, are some of the best types of content you can write. They are longer, more detailed, and more useful than typical blog posts or infographics, and usually come through a

Content writing for regular press releases is a valuable strategy. Although most legitimate news outlets nofollow most of their backlinks, with company news, you still receive: more brand visibility more attention earn a stronger reputation in your industry earn brand mentions build links from news publishers and other high-quality sites improved domain authority and SEO rankings There’s only one downside: press releases aren’t easy. Just paying to push your press release to various publishers can be expensive, and perhaps more importantly, getting your press release published is tough. Most publishers have incredibly strict standards and only let the most newsworthy posts onto their sites. That means you can’t just write about anything and submit it to the press—you have to have deep, meaningful, or otherwise newsworthy material to submit. If you’re trying to submit a press release on a regular schedule, perhaps weekly, this poses a critical problem. How do you go about finding topics for press releases on a weekly and consistent basis without compromising the quality of your final product? Responding to a Crisis This should be your first line for a press release, as it is the most urgent. However, this type of topic rarely, if ever, needs to be searched for. Crises appear randomly and without warning, but sending a press release off preemptively or in response to a crisis can be very helpful. For example, if one of your products is found to be defective, sending a press release is a perfect opportunity to explain the situation, clear your name, and get in front of the inevitable wave of negative attention that will come as a result. Legal Shifts and Public Information Also consider what legal shifts have occurred in the past week, or if any new information that’s publicly interesting has been revealed. For example, has your company experienced a transfer in ownership? Have you filed a lawsuit? Are you about to initially offer your stock to the public, or are you announcing any dividends? Any financial or legal information that you’re willing to publicly disclose could serve as a newsworthy press release, as long as you frame it in a way that emphasizes why it is valuable for the public to know about it. Upcoming Events If there are no crises or legal shifts in your company, consider what upcoming events your company will be participating in or hosting. For example: Does your company have any seminars coming up? Are you going to be appearing at a tradeshow? Will you be sponsoring an upcoming event? Keep in mind that these events don’t have to be large in scale, and they don’t even have to be in person. You could even write a press release about an upcoming webinar or online class series. Charity or Community Involvements These types of press releases are great because they’re about a local newsworthy event and they also portray your company in a very positive light. Take the opportunity to write a press release if your company makes a substantial charitable donation, or if your team is getting involved with some kind of charitable event. You could also write a press release if you sponsor a local event or team, or if you have any inspirational stories related to your brand that you could mention. Products, Promotions, or Contests Failing any charitable or community topics, you could move on to newsworthy events related to your products or offerings. Generally, these types of press releases are low on the totem pole; if you have something better to write about, write about it, and don’t just write about one of your existing products or your release is bound to be rejected. Instead, focus on brand new products coming out, major promotions you’re announcing, or a contest that needs a little help getting initial attention. Company Milestones Major milestones for your company are another potential press release topic, so long as the milestone is actually newsworthy. For example: Have you reached an anniversary for your company? Have you recently revised your brand or updated your website significantly? Have you hit a specific revenue figure or made significant personnel changes? Have you won any awards or public recognition for your efforts? Any milestone like these could be turned into a valuable press release. New Market Trends or Other Thought Leadership Material If you’re still hard-pressed for a press release topic after considering all of the options above, you can write a release on new trends in your industry, or any new information you’ve uncovered in the course of doing business. New market research, studies, or polls work great here, as well as any events or situations that illustrate your personnel as authoritative in the industry. Press releases may seem intimidating at first, and there’s no question that they’re difficult to take on. But with a little experience and a lot of patience, you can start collecting more, better ideas for your press releases and get backlinks from high profile news sites. Don’t be intimidated if many of your early press releases fail to make it to publication; it’s just the nature of the business. All you can do is write the best, most consistent material you can, submit it to the most relevant publication sources, and hope for the best. Even a handful of press links will make all your efforts worth it. Want more information on our content promotion or link building services? Head over to our comprehensive guide on content marketing here: The All-in-One Guide to Planning and Launching a Content Marketing Strategy.

Google owns roughly 90% of desktop searches and 95% of mobile searches. As such, the search giant has a massive trove of search data–some of which is shares for free via an awesome little tool called Google Trends. In this post, we discuss how you can use Google Trends search data to make strategic marketing decisions that can significantly increase your own website traffic. Let’s dig in! What Is Google Trends? & How Does It Work? Google Trends, started in 2012, is one of the most powerful tools as it bears the knowledge of frequently changing search trends. It can help you discover all you need to know about a news search term: the number of times it was looked up when it happened, global regions where the search originated, and so much more. It also takes the site’s search volume and the time period into consideration when fetching the results for you. The tool is designed to dig deep into granular data in real-time. It can carry out comparative keyword research and lets you discover event-triggered fluctuations in the keyword search keyword volume. The information and insights provided by the tool are incredibly accurate since Google has made pathways into the everyday lives of millions of people who use its search capabilities globally. All in all, Google trends shows offer valuable data in the form of segmented keyword research with search volume, search engine user, geographical locations, and more. However, many people mistakenly believe that Google Trends is nothing more than scientific polls used to gather data. But in reality, this tool is a lot more powerful, comprehensive, and thorough at extracting data that exclusively reflects the search interest in the market. It tells you about the most searched words and spikes in particular topics according to the keywords you provide for the tool. However, the data from the tool always represents one side of the story. Using the data, marketers need to Google trends research through various angles to draw the best conclusion. What Makes Google Trend Popular For Driving Traffic? While every consumer journey is unique, there is something to be said for the collective experiences that lead to search trends when many people search for the same thing simultaneously. When used repeatedly online, the words, questions, and topics can quickly tell anyone if their product or service is in demand. To get the customers to your website, you need to lure them in with what they need. And that’s why you need all the insights you can get to figure out how to entice your target audiences. Marketers also rely on Google Analytics to find this data, but not many know the importance of having Google Trends in the marketer’s toolkit. Where analytics provide periodic data only, Google trends shows offer real-time live updates. It helps marketers and businesses explore data across decades and dig deeper in the search engine history to see historical Google trends and understand how people consume the search results. Google Trends is popular because it offers datasets that can build various search engine marketing and link building strategies for driving traffic – whether it’s PPC, SEO, or social media marketing. Once you know the most trending search queries, you can pave the best path to reach your consumers. Google Trends Data – What’s Included? Google trends data is an unbiased set of anonymized, categorized, and aggregated real time search data that enables marketers to measure audiences’ interest in any topic across search results. They can further refine it according to the location from city level and up to global level. Use the free data explorer on Google Trends to look up any topic, keywords, or phrases and learn about their search volume. This way, you can discover what other relevant search terms are garnering attention online. The trends data can be of two types. These are: Real-Time Data Search engine data from the last seven days. Non-Real Time Data Datasets can age back to any year in the past to as early as the last 36 hours. Now that you have discovered the basics of Google Trends, Trends Data, and how it differs from other Google tools, let’s dig deeper. Using Google Trend Searches For Driving Traffic To Your Platforms Google Trends is the key to enhancing your digital presence and speeding up traffic acquisition for your website. If you are not using the mighty tool, you are far behind your competitors and missing out on many vital insights that can instantly boost the traffic on your website. If you look forward to knowing the latest Google trends on the web, Google Trends is the best tool to get you all the insights. It will help you access the most trending topics, keywords, and phrases for strengthening your marketing campaigns. Here’s how you can achieve all this: What Do You Need To Do? First of all, you need to open Google Trends and lookup for data. Sort it by type, category, region, or a specific time period. Try different things to draw out some conclusions, and then put them all together to find the best results. Utilize the trending topics, predictions, and related queries to optimize your content and website to draw more traffic and boost sales. For example, use the tool to find the search volume of a specific phrase over time to identify its peak season. This will help you plan the content distribution according to the peak seasons. Curate Content Based On Trending Topics Do you have content on your website that doesn’t get frequent visits, no matter how good it is? If yes, then it might be on a topic that people don’t find interesting. Marketers need to explore trending topics and use what they discover to inform their SEO and content marketing strategies. Once you know the trend, create blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, and more. Next, optimize them with the most trending keyword phrases to rank them on the SERPs. Using this strategy will

As of July 2021, there are a total of 153,210 expired domain on the internet. Most people don’t realize that these are one of the most effective yet untapped ways to boost SEO performance. A good backlink profile is essential to build credibility for your website, and expired domain can help you do it faster. Since it is not easy to build backlinks, a well-established and quality domain can give your website a higher value out of the gate. But, there are downsides to acquiring expired domain’s, especially if you do it wrong. Why Acquire Expired Domains Many don’t think about the potential benefit of buying expired domain’s for SEO purposes. But, if it is done right, acquiring defunct or existing (but not currently live) domains CAN boost your SEO results (if done correctly). Here are a few reasons to acquire an expired domain: You may like the brand-ability, seeking to rebrand your website to the new URL The domain may have some exact match domain value that you could glean from it The domain may have existing links (and perhaps organic traffic) that you might be able to leverage by: Setting up a new site and a new business with this domain Adding this domain as a powerful piece in a large private blog network strategy  Setting up 301 redirects from the expired site to a site you already own Below is detailed information about why you might buying expired domain’s names and how your SEO team can use them for your benefit. Expired Domain Overview What are expired domain’s all about? They’re the URLs of defunct websites. Over its life, a website may collect many links from other sites. If the website isn’t in business anymore or the domain gets canceled, you can buy the domain and also acquire its links. Many business owners purchase expired domain names so they can redirect traffic and get ‘link juice’ that will theoretically lead to better search rankings. If you’re careful, you can use an expired domain for SEO, but don’t think that you can only do that to get SEO results. You’ll need to have a comprehensive SEO strategy that includes linking, content, video, social media, keyword optimization, and more, in addition to buying old domain names. One of the key things to leveraging theme domains is choosing the correct website for the redirect. It should be, before the site owner removed it, like the target page. This means users who click the link and come to the new site need to feel the value that they would have had if they had gone to the old site. You should ensure that their user experience is at least as good as on the old site, and hopefully better. Why You Should Consider Acquiring Expired Domains When you purchase the correct expired domain, you may get an edge over some of the site owners in your space. Here are some of the benefits, if you do it right: You Can Target Specific Traffic That Relates To You When you purchase an expired URL, you can collect some of that traffic for your site. Many old websites may have the traffic that you need for your current site. As most of us know, successful websites need traffic to thrive. If you don’t get enough visitors, you won’t make money. If you start a new website, you can start from scratch, which has benefits. But you’ll figure out that growing your traffic can take months and even years. To build your following, you need to do many things right: SEO keyword optimization create incredible content perform outreach link building Doing all these things is always critical, but you may be able to speed things up by buying old or expiring domains names. If the domain is an exact match domain, there is additional benefit, particularly if the expired exact match domain has quality links. (Active) Domain & Page Age Matters To Google The age of the old active URL and the backlinks pointing to it are ranking factors. I Old websites are usually more established and credible than new ones. Many sites with a lot of spam come out every day, and most don’t last. Usually, sites that have been up for years have a higher level of credibility. Backlinks Already Exist If you buy an old domain names from someone who was trying to get a high rank, you probably have a domain that has a lot of good links. Most of us in this industry know that it can take years to develop quality backlinks. One way to thrive with your site is to have excellent backlinks, and Google tells us that quality backlinks indicate a higher level of authority. If you buy the right older domains, you will not have to do as much work building links. You can build on the old owner’s effort and that is less time than starting from the beginning. However, only when there is a strong link profile for the expired domain will this approach get quality backlinks. Existing PageRank, Domain Authority and Domain Rating When you have a high PageRank (Google, but now defunct), Domain Authority (Moz) or Domain Rating (Ahrefs), it typically means Google will treat your site with more authority and rank you higher for specific search terms. The search engine figures out how important a page is based on many things, including how good the backlinks are. If you are able to pick up a expired site like losangelesattorney.com and it already has links, it will have a higher likelihood of site’s ranking quickly when the site is relaunched than if the site were newly registered or even if it had been registered but never had links. Click here to check your website’s domain authority (DA) now. Setting Up a Private Blog Network We have discussed private blog networks or PBNs at length before. Private blogs networks are not something we encourage, but they represent the quintessential form of